Spanish

Course summary

With some 400 million speakers, Spanish is the fourth most commonly spoken language in the world. Only Mandarin, English and Hindi have more speakers. Spanish is an official language on four continents and is the mother tongue in 21 countries. Knowing another language, particularly one as widely spoken as Spanish will be extremely useful when you are looking for a job. With the world becoming ever more global, contact with people of other countries has increased tremendously in recent decades. Learning Spanish can also help you to improve your knowledge of your own language. Spanish is from the Romance language family of languages, its roots coming primarily from Latin. English, too has many words of Latin origin. Because of this, knowing Spanish helps speakers of English (as well as some other European languages) broaden their vocabulary in as well as understand the grammar of their native language. Often, these same Latin roots are at the base of many sophisticated words in English, so Spanish learners can also become more proficient in English.